Q&A: Volcano Choir on Repave and the Beauty of Collaboration

When For Emma, Forever Ago put Bon Iver — and the woods of Wisconsin — on the musical map in 2009, Justin Vernon became an unofficial, if reluctant, ambassador for the Midwestern music scene. In spite of stylistic differences that shouldered no parallel with the heartbroken strains and acoustic articulations of "Skinny Love," every band between Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Eau Claire has since been recognized within the context of a Six Degrees of Justin Vernon framework. Vernon is a member of Gayngs, the gigantic collective of musicians headed up by Ryan Olson that includes Har Mar Superstar and members of Doomtree, Solid Gold, Poliça, and The Rosebuds; before Bon Iver, he played in DeYarmond Edison, which included Brad and Phil Cook of Megafaun and Chris Porterfield of Field Report. Some time in between writing the bulk of For Emma, Forever Ago at a cabin in rural Wisconsin and the record's release, Vernon, Chris Rosenau, Jon Mueller, Matthew Skemp, Daniel Spack, and Thomas Wincek started swapping songwriting ideas, and that musical kinship coalesced with the formation of Volcano Choir.

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This is not to say that Justin Vernon is a guitar-wielding catalyst, a secret ingredient that makes the music scenes of the Midwest go 'round; this is to say that Vernon is very much a symptom of the collaborative community he belongs to, and this is ever apparent on Repave, Volcano Choir's hotly anticipated sophomore record. Unmap, Volcano Choir's debut, dropped in 2009, right as things were starting to ramp up for Vernon with Bon Iver. Volcano Choir's other members were split between projects of their own, with Wincek and Skemp working together in All Tiny Creatures and Mueller on his experimental project, Death Blues. As they progressed with their own endeavors, Rosenau headed up Volcano Choir, a well they'd return to in order to bounce ideas off each other in between tours and treks to the studio with their other bands. As a result, Repave is a labor of love evenly split between the contributions of six distinct voices — and not one that banks solely on Vernon's celebrity. Volcano Choir is a band that's the sum of its parts, and Rosenau, Wincek, and Vernon, in particular, are excited to see where Repave will take them.

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ESQUIRE.COM: Unmap came out in 2009, but you started writing it in 2005, right? It sounds like this band started out as a musical pen pal relationship of sorts.

THOMAS WINCEK: Yeah, I think that's totally accurate.

CHRIS ROSENAU: That's right. We started "writing" Unmap, because essentially, we weren't writing a Volcano Choir record; we were just kind of writing to write, to trade ideas between friends.

ESQ: It's been four years between records in both cases, then, with the conception of Unmap and its delivery, and between the releases of Unmap and Repave. Was the decision to wait four years between writing and releasing Repave by necessity or design?

CR: Initially, the kind of time that Repave took was by necessity, because of other projects and things that everyone had going on. As we started embracing those time periods off, we started letting these songs just sit in our brains and percolate through driving to work or doing whatever we were doing. I think we really started liking what was happening, and as we started realizing that, there was even less of a rush to do anything. Such cool stuff ended up happening when we could play around, and build these things up, and tear them back down, and that started because of necessity. But by the end, we were just languishing in it, and relishing in it, and loving the fact that there was no deadline, that we could keep reworking these songs until we were really, really happy with them, which is why they sound the way they do on Repave.

JUSTIN VERNON: There's something that happens when a song takes months and years to create. Psychologically, when you live with something that long before it's finished, it takes on a lot of water. I think that's another thing that adds to it, and the record starts to be about that process a little bit. It takes time and transformation. It's an intellectual thing for the record.

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ESQ: Do you compartmentalize when it comes to your musical efforts? It's great that you allow these ideas to percolate — and not to single you out, Justin — but that's got to be demanding, especially with your commitment to Bon Iver.

JV: I know what you mean, about the compartmentalization thing, but I've found that moving from project to project a bunch as we all have — most of my friends that do music are involved in lots of different things — for some reason, when you're just using your ears and not thinking of the fashion of what you're doing in any regard, you just naturally react to what's currently happening. There's a chemistry to Volcano Choir that's very palpable, and real, and easy to react to, because of who's in the band and what's happening. When it's time to "do" Volcano Choir and you're with those folks working on music that comes from the people in the band when you're all together in that room, it's Volcano Choir time! [Laughs.]

TW: Obviously, when you're with different people, like Justin said, you're going to react differently to what they're doing. Little bits from other projects I'm doing, ideas or influences, whatever sounds you're into at the moment or working on, you integrate that into what you're working on, and that's fun.

CR: We really respect and trust what our other friends and brothers in this band bring to it. It's almost like an anti-compartmentalization. All of these different ideas that everyone brings in, that's part of the total excitement, mystery, and miracle that ends up happening when we have Volcano Choir time.

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ESQ: What strengths come out in Volcano Choir between the six of you that we don't necessarily get to see with your other projects? You come from a particularly collaborative scene split between Minneapolis and Milwaukee. Is this a Midwestern thing, this "get by with a little help from my friends" approach to songwriting?

JV: There's a little bit of Midwestern nomenclature in the lyrics of Repave, but I think that in general, the older I get, the less and less I care about whether or not I'm Midwestern or not. The community I happen to be a part of, my friends and family, that's my stitching. I do think there's a need to want to reflect it and celebrate it a little bit, or at least point out that we're a certain type of people where that's totally a thing. You come here, and people are a little different. As far as music scenes go, in Minneapolis and Milwaukee — more than Chicago, I think — the music scenes are not fragmented by genres. People will just be hanging out. A singer/songwriter person will hang out with some really weird computer death metal situation. It doesn't matter. People are cooler with general acceptance and encouragement to go left. There are a lot of left-wing musicians in the Midwest, because of their need to not play the game or something. They go off the rails.

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TW: In each one of our individual projects that we have and concentrate on, we definitely call the shots. In All Tiny Creatures, I feel like I'm calling the shots. Justin writes all the Bon Iver stuff. Chris, it's very much like he's in charge with his projects, whereas with this, no one's in charge, really. Any kind of idea can fly if we like it. That's the unique thing with this band.

CR: It's funny that Volcano Choir ended up being our greatest place to just draw up any idea. Some ideas, because of the way that we've set these other projects up, they're not gonna fit. I don't want to say that it's the way we "set" Volcano Choir up, because we've never set Volcano Choir up, it just started existing, and I think it's hysterical that this band is the band that we all feel like we can just try any idea and trust that it's going to get the attention that it needs.

ESQ: I love that you can actually hear this collaboration at work on the record. "Acetate" stands out to me specifically — I don't want to say that it's got a cowboy choir vibe, but your voices are very present throughout the song. There's no emphasis on a particular singer, and I think that goes back to what we were talking about, in that this band is a nurturing environment for all of you. Was there a moment in the studio when this direction of the record was defined?

TW: There were a couple of "Oh, yeah!" moments. When we started down the path of group vocals, we weren't singing individually — we did the group vocals all in one room into one stereo microphone. I think Justin actually came up with that idea, and once we did it a couple of times, we thought that was pretty cool. That stands out to me as a moment.

CR: All of these songs were convergent evolutions. It wasn't just ideas that came to fruition. "Almanac" ended up being this perfect period at the end of the sentence for the record, because that's the song that has so much of us. We listened to each other throughout the whole recording process of that song, from the moment the acoustic guitar and that arpeggio came together, to the second Justin started singing the chorus vocals. That was actually the first song that I ever started for that record, and it was the one that evolved the longest. There wasn't a second when we didn't look at each other going, "What the fk kind of music is this? What are we doing?" but still at the same time not questioning it all. "This fking rules! We're so excited to share this! What the fk is this?" I love that feeling.

ESQ: It's not uncommon for a song from a "supergroup" to make its way into the set list when one of its members is out playing a show with their own project — i.e., a Volcano Choir song getting played for an audience at a Bon Iver show. Does this happen with you guys, or do you only play Volcano Choir songs when all of Volcano Choir is present?

TW: I could never imagine doing that. From a technical standpoint and also because of what we're doing individually, it seems like no one else should be doing it.

JV: I read somewhere that people are thinking Repave sounds like another Bon Iver album, but I'm not gonna go out there and say, "No, but you don't understand!" because that's people's opinions. It's just so clear to me that Volcano Choir is such a band, such a new thing that came from absolutely new songs. It's such a Repave! [Laughs.]

ESQ: It must be frustrating to hear people make the mistake of calling this a Bon Iver side project.

TW: It's slightly annoying, but if I spent any time worrying about it, I'd spend too much time worrying about it. A lot of that stems from the amount of import that pop music places on lead singers. For some people, that's literally all they listen to, even when you consider the history of the band.

ESQ: How has your collective understanding of balance and contributing to a record like Repave changed? What are the differences between 2005 and 2013, in that regard, when it comes to defining gratification when you've got six people with incredibly demanding schedules to contend with?

JV: My quick answer to that is that I've gotten to do music as a principal vocation for most of the days of the years for almost eight years now, and I've developed this thing where I just need this band. My body, mind, and heart lean toward Volcano Choir, like, "Oh, yeah, I gotta see these guys. We gotta make some music." I think we all have that, that "I need to go be with these guys and work out what's in me" thing. Everybody brings that energy to it.

CR: It's really clear as we go through this whole thing together that the only thing we give a shit about is what we want people to know about this stuff that we're doing. As far as balance goes, we don't care about the commercial aspect. We don't feel like we have to release this record by this date, or whatever. At the same time, we have the long view — when we're talking about who should do a music video or what should we do, it's easy to get caught up when a super-famous guy wants to do our music video. At the end of the day, we all wrangle ourselves back in, like, "Listen, guys, what matters is what we live with, forever, and what we present to the world that will exist forever." I think a younger band or a band with less experience doesn't have that luxury of knowledge, maybe.

JV: "Luxury of knowledge." I love that. Being an artist, it's almost a duty, in that your position in the world as an artist is to not have a job and to be creative. Artists should be there to lift people up and change their perspective. We're supposed to not give a shit. We're supposed to not have a job. We're there to rearrange shit, you know?